In the book of Exodus the people of the Lord reached a place where their making a molten calf in the wilderness had provoked the anger of God. And the Lord spake unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, that thou broughtest up out of the land of Egypt, (God didn’t own them anymore. He told Moses they were his people!) have corrupted themselves: they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed unto it, and said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. Exodus 32:7–10.
God said to Moses, “Let Me alone.” I thank God that we have an irritating quality to God when we stand in prayer. He can no more draw back from us when we get to praying than a mother can ignore a child when it is hungry and crying. God puts something in that baby’s cry that is shattering; it gets through to her and demands an answer. So it is with us. “How much more shall the Heavenly Father avenge them speedily that cry day and night unto Him” (Luke 18:8).
The Israelites’ circumstance is in no way to be compared with ours, but the cry of Moses to God and his reason is very much like our situation. The circumstances and their rebellion and their idolatry is not our sin. Our cry is to be submissive. We are doing everything we can to avoid rebellion, to walk in obedience to the Lord, to put away everything that is unrighteous and to move into the very life of Christ. We are not to be compared with that situation, but the words that follow, the thinking of Moses, concerns us. And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, that thou hast brought forth… Moses did not buy that. “They’re your people, Moses, that you brought out.” He reminded God, thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Of course they were Moses’ people, but they were also basically God’s people, and he was not letting God forget. It was incidental that they were Moses’ people.
You are my people but we do not own each other in the sense of possession. We are all God’s people. It is a matter of responsibility and stewardship. You can have ten thousand instructors in Christ but ye have not many fathers (I Corinthians 4:15). We have a relationship, but you are God’s people.
Moses says, Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, For evil did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Moses was calling a spade a spade. He told God to repent of the evil He had purposed toward His people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swearest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the Lord repented of the evil which he said he would do unto his people. Exodus 32:11–14.
I stood on this following Scripture for years. And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. And he said unto him, if thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence. Exodus 33:14–15.
This is important. We face something in our walk at this present time and the quicker we face it, the better. There are many ways of handling a situation when you sense problems. I know that God has to put up with a lot from me, but I can come and call for the longsuffering and the mercies of God because I need them and I am human. But there is something in that apparent reluctance of God that calls for us to stand up to Him and say, “It’s all right for us to be a problem to You but You cannot be a problem to us. You’re our God.” To be reverent and to worship the Lord is going to lead you to this sooner or later. The only real deep plane of reverence and worship is going to come forth in that which stands in the grace of God and refuses to submit to the problems that you have yourself. You are not going to be entangled and ensnared in the wilderness. You are going to move into what God has for you, and there has to be an approach of violence in your spirit.
We are not going to use the promises of God, or the word that has come, as a shot in the arm. The vision God has given must be what God says it is to be, and more. We are not going to speak one thing, and find just a few drops when our cups should be running over. We are not going to be embarrassed for God’s Word, and we are not going to make excuses. God knew what we were when we first got into this. He knows what He has to put up with and He has given you a word. That is God’s problem. We throw ourselves into the grace of God. The mess you may feel that you are in is God’s problem. As long as you are pressing in with all of your heart, with all of your soul and mind and strength, crying unto God, I do not care if you stumble until your knees are bleeding and you are wounded: as long as you get up and go on with God, one thing has to happen—everything that is written in the Bible and promised to you must be fulfilled by God.
We must have something from God and have it soon. It is not a matter of exalting the flesh but of God raising up some fine men and making them everything they are supposed to be. He is going to use them. We must start contending for miracles on an unprecedented scale, greater than at any time in the history of the Church. Yell for them. We have a word and it is going to be turned loose. This walk in the spirit is of God. He is going to move on our behalf.
You are doing the same thing on a personal level that many others have done. In all that you have been contending for, you know that we are just getting a little bit of what we really should be walking in. We have had enough promises and enough Word preached to us that if this thing were really working in our lives as it should, we would be walking in a hundred times more right now. Take your share of the blame, which may be ninety-nine percent, but that other one percent is with a faithful God who moves with integrity. He is not a man that He should lie, neither the Son of man that He should repent and yet Moses made Him repent. God is entitled to be exasperated with us, but He is bound by His own Word. How many things are in the heart of God? I feel like Moses: “Okay, these people made a mistake, but when You fail to do for them what You have promised, You are going to be embarrassed, God, in front of the Egyptians. They are going to say, ‘He started something He couldn’t finish.’ ”
Our whole approach should be contending for the greater glory of God. We are not going to be bogged down in this rut. Some of you have problems. You need to be shaken, you need to wake up every once in a while. I would do anything to you to keep you stirred up, to keep the spirit of this age from filling you with indifference and passivity. I will not let it happen to you. On the other hand, we will not have the kind of preaching that puts people under condemnation. When we pray for the sick and the sick are not healed, we will not say, “Well, dear brother, you just didn’t have faith.” We are going to have faith for them if they do not have faith. We are going to see the job done whether they come with anything at all or not. We are going to put the responsibility on our shoulders and on God’s shoulders and say, “Lord, we are going to lay hands on them and You are going to heal them. We are to speak Your Word and You are to perform signs and wonders.”
Many will rise up and persecute anything they do not understand. That is not going to bother us; it is not even going to stir a feeling in our hearts. But one thing is going to bother us—if we suffer the Lord’s reproach but never get to know His fullness. We are going to walk in it.
We must storm heaven. We must have what God has for us. Hasn’t it bothered you that we have so much committed to us and it is not flowing as freely as it should? This walk with God is the greatest thing God has ever given, but if it stopped at this point, I would be embarrassed that God was not able to finish it. He is God, He is great, He is mighty. Someday in eternity He will explain why it did not work for certain people in certain centuries. Fine—maybe He has a good explanation, but I am not going to accept an explanation or excuses now. It is going to work now! I could go through those years that God was testing, trying us, and working in us. But we should get into the fruitfulness of it now. We have had the plowing, we have had the sowing, we have had the cultivating, the weeding, but it is not moving the way it will have to move.
God has to please us and our faith has to please Him. He said, “Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalms 37:4). If we are delighting ourselves in the Lord and have been doing it very consistently, then the desires of our heart are ours. The desires of my heart are not just somebody’s idea of how much I can have. I have desires that are pretty big. Is that going to trouble God? That is His problem. His problem is being God and my problem is to be His obedient worshiper, dedicated to Him with all my heart. I expect, by His grace, help, and patience, to enter into that with all my heart, and I expect Him to do, with all His heart, the things that He has said. My expectancy is great but it is turning to the point where it has become a little violent and insistent.
We are going to learn something about prayer we have never known before. If it is because of some neglect of prayer that we have not moved forward faster, we are going to find out. There is no negative note in this. We are believing, and it is not a vague mental assent, but it is a specific definite faith that is going to turn you loose for the things that God has for you to walk in. We are not looking for a trickle, we are looking for a torrent. We are not looking for just a little drop, we want a deluge. We are not looking to just survive; we are looking to be more than overcomers. We are going to be ruthless and violent about what God is to do, and about what is to be turned loose. This thing is not just a little prayer kick. Put your heart to it with all that is within you.
We are going after whatever God has for us. I want it to work on an unprecedented scale or get a direct apology from the Lord. You say, “That sounds sacrilegious.” It is not when men like Moses would pray like they prayed. “Now You repent, Lord, of what You are going to do here. What are the Egyptians going to say? You want to start something You can’t finish?” God started His church and God started every one of us. Some are content to sit back and let the devil get away with what he is doing, let the thing wipe them out. There is a limit to human endurance but God knows those limits, and that is what God is for—to meet that need, to bring forth His will in your life. This is the time of the double portion. There is going to be enough of God to meet us. It is going to be that way because we are going to intercede and cry until He comes on the scene. Nothing happens until people pray, and that is why we are going to enter into a new phase of real deep prayer.
The Scriptures tell us that we are to be patient unto the coming of the Lord, but the Greek reads, “steadfast.” That gives another slant on it completely. The passivity of the church, waiting for the Lord to come, occupying time in their little programs, is not what God is after. We are believing for Him to rend the heavens and come down.
The thing that is gripping the world is that they are asleep. It is gripping the churches. It is a snare that has come upon the whole world unaware. Every word from God says that we are supposed to be awake. Either we will come to the place where we are violently protesting or we will get sucked under, fall asleep, and be indifferent. This age has a hypnotic effect, and if you yield to it just a little, you will fall asleep in church. You cannot keep going. You have to be pressing in with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength or you are dead. There are no two ways. We must have that violence of prayer, that faith that makes demands of yourself as well as of God and believes that it is going to happen—and it will happen.
Life does not mean anything to us if we cannot walk in the perfect will of the Lord. What is there to live for? What do you want? What can you have? When you get right down to it, we have come to the place where we would all rather be dead if we are not going to move into the things of the Lord. There is no escape; there is no way out of this thing. If we do not walk in all of this from God, we are still going to find the blast of tribulation and trouble hitting this world. If we do not walk into this immunity, we are dead. The world situation and the control of the world order by Satan toward the endtime is taking place faster than our walk is progressing in God. We are going to change it. We are going to start praying. We can change it because God has made the commitment and the promise; it is all of God. We have to have violent, wholehearted prayer.
We are not going to go year after year without seeing God do something. The grace of God is not that way. God will meet our hearts, and if we submit to walking in a half measure blessing, that is what we will have the rest of our lives. God is reluctant to give to people what they are reluctant to ask for. Heaven holds back the blessings from those who are withdrawn and would hold back from the Lord. It is in the day you seek the Lord with your whole heart that you will find Him (Jeremiah 29:13).
There will be seeking after God and worshiping of God that is unparalleled. God has made Himself so available, but He has limited Himself to move through human instruments, so we are going to pray. There is to be enough of God in our walk for everybody. We are not to be apologetic about having a wonderful word from the Lord and not pressing in until it is fulfilled in glorious style. We are going to have it.
Set your heart on God, set your will: “This is going to be. God has given His Word and He’s going to be here in great measure.” Do not consider anything else. You are going to cry unto the Lord and it is going to be the way God said it is to be, and not fall short of it. It is going to be exceeding, abundantly, above all that we ask or think. Your walk will be everything that you believe it to be. You do not need to be disillusioned or bitter or draw back and say, “It’s something short; I didn’t get a complete deliverance.” We are going to be more than conquerors; we will be overcomers. We have set our hearts on God and now we must seek Him with all our heart, with all our mind, with all of our spirit. There is something within us that is reaching for it.
If we run up against anything that even challenges us, we are coming back to the Lord and say, “Come on; on the job.” We are not going to run into anything that is going to be a problem. We have to pray; we are dealing with situations that we never have before and there will be that double portion to meet them. We are not to say, “We can,” we are to say, “We shall.” We are to pray and stand with faith that does not say, “Maybe,” but claims it right now.
During periods of intense prayer, you will see a lot of different things. You will run the scale of feeling because you are coming into a higher level of spirit, and your soul life, your emotions will give over to whatever your spirit is doing at the moment. There will be times in which you will be weeping and agonizing with a real deep burden. Other times it will be violent prayer. Sometimes it will be joyful and shouting aloud before the Lord. Sometimes you will be in such agony that you cannot express it. The Holy Spirit is continually making intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26). Cannot God, all wise, do anything? Then why cannot the Holy Spirit even utter it? Because it is even beyond the Holy Spirit to find words for it—an agony, beyond what the Holy Spirit can bring.
We are still just hitting the surface of what we ought to be feeling toward prayer. The Lord Jesus ever liveth to make intercession for us (Romans 8:34). The holy Spirit and the Son cry out to the Father and intercede continually, and we, too, are groaning within ourselves, yearning for that redemption to come. How can the sons of God come forth unless you begin to live in that groaning and intercession? We will feel all of this. God is going to teach us a lot about prayer and we shall not learn about it in theory, but we shall see things happen in the name of the Lord.